Bar Exam

Loophole

Nets Lawyers

April 18, 1994|The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the town whose lawyers penned the internal revenue code and perfected the plea bargain, it's only fitting that the seminal document in the careers of many of them - the bar examination they took - boasts a loophole of its own.

Now, regulators are about to knot it tight. That they have found reason to do so raises some intriguing questions about the licensing of lawyers.

Since 1983, clever law graduates have been able to get a license to practice in the District of Columbia by passing only half of the bar exam - the easier half.

The short-cutters don't take the District exam. They head north and take the Pennsylvania test, whose laid-back grading standards are such that anyone who musters a 135 score on its 200 multiple-choice questions passes automatically. The other half of the test, a grueling essay section, thus becomes irrelevant.

Then they submit the results to the Washington courts, which, unlike bar regulatory bodies in all other American jurisdictions, immediately admit any applicant who has passed the bar exam of any state and who, in the process, has scored at least 133 on the multiple-choice part.

Of course, applicants could take the District exam, which recent first-time takers have passed about 70 percent of the time. They could take the daunting California exam, whose pass rate is about 50 percent.

But many prefer the Pennsylvania test, which boasts an 80 percent pass rate.

"It's the Tijuana of the law admissions world," said Cornish F. Hitchcock, a Washington lawyer who, as head of a subcommittee of the District of Columbia Bar Association, analyzed the dodge.

Hitchcock found that one in seven law graduates who earned a Washington legal license in 1991 had come to town by way of Pennsylvania. Granted, some had actually lived or attended school there.

But hundreds hadn't.

Does it matter that a sizable number of new Washington lawyers have been squeezing into town through a hole in the fence?

It certainly nags at the District of Columbia Bar Association, which says that gaining a license should entail more than an ability to check off a sufficient number of correct answers on a multiple-choice exam.

"Our concern is that a number of lawyers are being admitted to the District of Columbia bar even though no bar examiner has ever read, much less passed on, their ability to formulate a written response," Hitchcock said in the report of his subcommittee.